Ask yourself what Ron Dermer, adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, would have said had the president of the United States appointed as his ambassador to Israel an Israeli émigré known for his leftist views, somewhere between left-wing Meretz and the communist/non-Zionist Hadash party. What would the pro-Netanyahu Israeli daily Yisrael Hayom have written if a senior White House adviser working to undermine Netanyahu’s re-election as prime minister had been named US ambassador to Israel? What would Deputy Minister of Transportation Tzipi Hotovely of the Likud party have had to say about President Barack Obama’s choice of a senior official who had been involved in the invitation of a rival party leader to a much-publicized Washington visit at the height of the Israeli election campaign? How would the Israeli public have reacted to the nomination of an Israeli citizen who gave up his Israeli citizenship (a so-called “yored,” a pejorative term for someone who leaves Israel) to be the ambassador of a foreign country in Tel Aviv?

The criticism of Dermer’s appointment as Israeli ambassador to the United States does not concern his diplomatic skills or his experience in diplomacy. The frequent visits of Secretary of State John Kerry to the region and the long private talks that he conducts with Netanyahu epitomize the depreciation of the contributions made by ambassadors to the dialogue between Washington and Jerusalem.

The truly important issues are discussed, in any case, over well-secured phone lines between the president and the prime minister, far from the ears of the ambassadors. When the US president decides to appeal directly to the Israeli people, he talks with Channel 2 news anchor Yonit Levy or orders Air Force One readied for a trans-Atlantic flight. Therefore, Ambassador Dermer’s negative views of the two-state solution and the Palestinian partner will not influence the diplomatic process any more than the views of Dermer as diplomatic adviser to Netanyahu.

The main mission still entrusted to Israel’s ambassador in Washington is to rebuild mutual trust between Netanyahu and the Israeli administration and Obama and the Democratic camp. Dermer is considered one of the main saboteurs of their relations. Some consider his appointment insensitive and reflecting poor judgment on the part of the prime minister. At worst, positioning a person nurtured on neoconservatism will be perceived as poking the US president in the eye. Dermer is a graduate of the Shalem Center, a Jerusalem research institute, the ideological hotbed tended by Sheldon Adelson, the man who publicly declared war on Obama.